AHS faculty Prof. Holley Moyes, Prof. Nicola Lercari, and Prof. Emeritus Mark Aldenderfer -- along with UCM SoE Prof. YangQuan Chen and Dominique A Rissolo, Assistant Research Scientist at UCSD's Cultural Heritage Engineering Initiative -- have been awarded more than $100,000 from the National Science Foundation to acquire of the Emescent Hovermap system, a hand-held and UAV-based Light Detection and Ranging Velodyne LiDAR with a proprietary SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) and processing system. Designed for the mining industry, the Hovermap is a robust tool that enables rapid capture and visualization of complex topologies. This new technology allows for multiple on-demand surveys and on-the-fly opportunistic data collection that builds capacity for the rapid capture of complex subterranean/indoor contexts such as caves, rockshelters, or building interiors as well as terrestrial landscapes and surface architecture, producing representations for research that depends on accurate spatial data capture and imaging. The system allows for progressive LiDAR scanning while walking through constricted or confined spaces with the unit in hand, with plug-and-play transition to drone-based scanning as terrain and environments require. The system has propriety software that will stitch multiple images from each modality creating a high resolution 3D image with colorization.
